


living wood

by kiiouex



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Adam Turns Into A Tree, Claustrophobia, Elements of Horror, M/M, POV Second Person, Vengeful Woodchopping, enclosed spaces
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-29
Updated: 2016-02-29
Packaged: 2018-05-23 22:50:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,543
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6132871
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kiiouex/pseuds/kiiouex
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The oak stands heavy and glutted by the stream, and you set your torch down as you approach, twisting your axe threateningly in your hand as though the tree could be intimidated.</p><p>“Last chance to let him go,” you tell the forest, your Latin as brusque as Latin can be.</p>
            </blockquote>





	living wood

**Author's Note:**

> I think my interests must be getting pretty transparent by now :V
> 
> My beloved [telekinesiskid](http://archiveofourown.org/users/telekinesiskid) is unwell and asked for cute Pynch caretaking fluff, and I ignored her and wrote this instead. She still beta'd :'^)

You are not prepared for the immense darkness of Cabeswater when you fall asleep. You’d thought you were calm enough that your mind would be settled, but the waiting shadows are still and vast and overwhelming, and you glare about your dream forest as though betrayed by its mercurial turn.

Worse is that it’s not the hollow, familiar emptiness before the horrors come; the woods are quiet, trees silent, with no rustles or whispers or oncoming demons. Somewhere close, you can sense death stirring, but the part that truly unsettles you is that it doesn’t feel _wrong_. It’s a natural death, a slow unfolding, the woods swallowing something that was theirs all along.

You could escape into consciousness, but Cabeswater is yours and you think you need to know what is ending. Orphan Girl might be a comfort, but you have to move alone through your trees, every gap in the bushes a void, the canopy overhead as black as space and twice as hungry. A feeling of peace starts to filter through the branches, a calming tone that feels sickly sweet on your tongue. You don’t trust it, by the same excellent instincts that have saved you from trusting so many other things, and you continue.

The gentle feeling peaks, and washes away all at once, and you’re left squinting through the dark to find what had been the source. Standing before an enormous oak that you can’t recall having ever seen is the vague shape of a person. It’s the suggestion of a figure more than a real one, their head pressed against the bark, their arms wrapped wide around the trunk. They don’t even flinch as you approach, ignore you when you call out, “Hey.”

The shallow light has robbed them of detail, stolen their colour. You can’t even tell if their shirt is red, or brown, or grey, but as you get closer you realise it’s a figure you know too well, a silhouette pressed firm into your pupils fitting easily over the shadow in front of you. The slope of the shoulders, the curve of the neck to the perpetually bowed head, the hard-earned muscle in those slender arms.

You ask, “Adam?” and he turns, blue eyes the only bright thing in the dark. He looks tired and mournful as he sags against the oak, cheek pressed hard against the bark. You don’t know why you’d dream of him like this, and then you realise that you don’t know if he’s a dream-thing at all. “Are you real?”

He opens his mouth, and a sprig of oak blooms in place of his tongue. His brown skin is creasing, changing, getting darker, darker, until there’s no difference between his flesh and the oak’s. The blue in his eyes goes black, reflective, windows to somewhere cold and far away, and he turns back to the tree.

You throw yourself forward, try to get a hold on his arms or his waist to wrench him away, but your fingers catch on the bark and scrabble worthlessly against the wood as Adam’s shape sinks smoothly into the trunk. In only a few seconds there’s nothing, not a piece of him left, just the forest slowly exhaling and the oak’s trunk undisturbed, covered in lichen like he’d always been a part of it.

You wake up. You’re in your own bed and panting, nails bloody with splinters and scraps of moss still trapped beneath. In an instant, you’re upright, shoving your feet into boots and trying to think where Adam might be. He’d asked you to go with him in the afternoon, for ‘grounds keeping’, and you refused. You didn’t hear of him getting home.

In the stale, restless air of your room, it feels impossible that you were just in Cabeswater and seeing Adam consumed, mundane overpowering even your magic. You’re overtired, still dizzy with the need to sleep, your new panic just adding a layer of electricity to your burned out brain. You’re not in a great state to judge reality.

But your tattered nails know what you found.

You get a jacket. Gansey’s sprawled out over his bed in the main room, journal sliding from his fingers to the mess of his sheets, glasses sitting on his face as testament to how little he expected to sleep. His chest pulls in calm, smooth breaths, and you hesitate before waking him. He has spent enough midnight hours searching for his friends’ bodies. This time, you think, you can take care of it on your own. Noah’s curled up at the foot of the bed, eyes dark and watchful, but he only whispers, “Good luck,” as you head out the door.

The air outside is like it was in your room, heavy and listless, too full of your thoughts for there to be space for anything else. In the distance you think you hear the roar of street racing, and a primal part of you aches to respond, a part that you have no time to indulge. It’s not a good night for more trouble. There’s an axe in the pile of wooden ramps you never finished, and you load that into your trunk, rolling the BMW’s windows all the way down before you start driving, engine cruelly loud in the empty night.

The road out to Cabeswater is a lightless streak on the earth, the occasional headlights of oncoming traffic offensively bright against your eyes. The flash in the second before they pass is the worst, but it’s good to have a sound besides the thrum of your wheels on the road. It’s a hypnotic rhythm, lulling you into a trance, and your night is surreal enough without that kind of suggestion. At any moment the dense air will press in too tight and you’ll wake back up in your room with a steering wheel in your hands and moss for a pillow, Adam trapped on a grudging midnight phone call to Gansey. It would make more sense than what you’re doing now. The endless shimmer of your lights on the road is playing with the parts of you that haven’t slept in a day or two, and your whole world feels fake.

You drive on anyway.

The grass closest to Cabeswater has been flattened a dozen times under the wheels of the Camaro, and you pull into the familiar place, hauling your axe and a torch out with you. The torch is from Gansey, an obnoxiously yellow, industrial device that came along with the rest of an emergency kit he insisted you take. You refused to be grateful for it then, and you’ll refuse now, even as the beam lights up the tricky, uneven forest floor.

It doesn’t feel like it did in your dream, and that doesn’t change even when you reach Cabeswater. It’s stifling, suffocating, but that’s heat and your own exhaustion, your own frantic, muddied need to save Adam from something that might have already happened. You’re good at burying your fear, but that doesn’t mean it’s dormant, it’s just something more easily channelled into anger alongside your furious heartbeat. If a tree has swallowed your Adam, then you are going to turn it into firewood and get him back. If you can’t get him back, then you are going to formally apologise to Gansey, and torch the forest.

If he had just looked a little less indifferent in the afternoon when he’d asked you to come along. If Noah hadn’t _that afternoon_ discovered the magic of industrial strength blenders. Your fingers are tight on the axe’s handle as you wade into the woods.

The feeling might be wrong, but the sound is the same; unbroken silence, just the gentle inhale of the trees without even insect noise to break it up. For a moment, you truly feel like you’re walking around inside your own head. And you think of Adam’s terrible, hopeless stare, and get back to searching for the oak. You’ve never seen it before, nothing so huge and grand in the Cabeswater you know, and you struggle to recall anything else that had been around it as you’d watched it eat Adam. Possibly, under the rasp of wood scraping worthlessly against your fingers, there had been the sound of water.

And then you know where it is.

The oak stands heavy and glutted by the stream, and you set your torch down as you approach, twisting your axe threateningly in your hand as though the tree could be intimidated. If it’s part of Cabeswater, then you don’t see why it can’t be. But if it’s a part of Cabeswater then it shouldn’t have eaten _Adam_ , not when the woods know what you want, not when you ripped the tips of your fingers open trying to tear him free.

“Last chance to let him go,” you tell the forest, your Latin as brusque as Latin can be.

The tree fails to relinquish Adam. Standing in front of it, seeing the lichen streaked with your blood, you no longer have doubts. Carefully, digging the tip of the axe’s blade into the bark, you lever a small chunk out of the trunk. For a moment you’re not sure what you’re looking at, the revealed wood rising and falling, but you press your thumb against it, feel it warm and smooth and hiss out between your teeth. At least he’s still breathing. It doesn’t feel like much consolation.

You work around what you’ve already cleared, bitterly aware that a smaller tool than the axe would have been much more helpful, but you work with what you’ve got. Where the axe’s blade can’t fit, you use your hands, gritting your teeth against the sting on your torn skin and prying bark and wood loose, clawing as much of it away as you can.

You rip a long line of bark down, bare a stretch of his skin, and the wood begins to groan, an arcane sound that makes you growl instead of shiver. A hand bursts free a second later, scattering splinters and grasping wildly out, catching your shoulder. The fingers curl hard against you, and you feel the tremble all the way up his arm. You stroke the back of his hand slowly, rub your thumb against his wrist and feel the frantic beat of his pulse, and it takes a moment before he releases your shoulder and latches onto your hand instead, fingers gripping yours tight enough to strangle.

You don’t make him let go. You wrench at the wood with your other hand, clearing larger and larger scraps of tree, and you’re lucky it was hollow for him, you’re lucky there was a thin enough layer that you can force your way through, and you clear enough to uncover the edge of his shirt, his shoulder, the bulge of his neck as he gulps down air.

There’s a weird skittering noise it takes you too long to recognise as his other hand working against the wood from the inside, and he helps you with the rest, shoving shards of bloodied wood out of the way, streaks left on the inside from his own torn fingertips.

And then you clear out what was covering his face, and he stares out at you, eyes wide with horror while his chest heaves, shoulders shaking with the most well-earned panic you have ever seen, and you drag him out, pull him through the jagged edges of the hole and into your arms.

“God,” you say, and “Fuck,” because nothing else seems remotely appropriate. You think you’re shaking almost as much as he is, adrenaline giving way to something else, and Adam Parrish clinging to you is a sign of how grossly wrong the world is tonight.

“Thank you,” he whispers. Behind him the oak looms, hollow and hungry, ragged-edged hole silently waiting. You don’t know what the tree was before, but you know what it is now, and you don’t want to be near it any longer than you have to be. Adam hasn’t stopped trembling yet. It seems completely reasonable that he might never stop.

You stand carefully and pull him up with you. His hand hasn’t left yours since you first clawed it free, your fingers are starting to throb in his stranglehold. You still don’t make him let go. He’s also perfectly capable of walking out of the woods on his own, but you don’t make him, grappling the axe and the torch in one hand while you carefully tow him back to the car.

“I couldn’t stop it,” he says before you ask, and the shadows under his eyes are haunted. “There was a knot in the tree that just… drew me in. Like scrying. The dark of it was too deep, and it swallowed me.”

You already accepted that the oak was evil, and actively eating people is a fine extension of that. “I didn’t know you couldn’t handle gardening on your own,” you tell him, knowing that you’ll be following him to Cabeswater from now on, because you’re not sure you’ve got it in you to carve him out of a tree again.

You came _that close_ to writing it off as a dream. You can’t tell him.

There is finally a breeze when you make it out of the trees, a light stir that sweeps the dread from the air and replaces it with nothing but a cool touch. It’s grounding in a way nothing else has been all night, and you lean into it, exhausted but fully awake.

You’re going to be picking splinters out of your hands for days, unless you get Gansey to do it. He can do Adam’s, too. Adam leans against the door of the car, as though reluctant to tuck himself back into an enclosed space again so soon, and your linked hands mean you go with him, smooth curve of the car against your back, broad sky open before you.

“Thank you,” he says again.

“Fuck, Parrish. Did you think I’d leave you in a tree?”

He says, “No,” in a way that means several things, and you watch as the tremors finally ease out of his shoulders. He’s got enough nightmare material for the next decade, and there’s a part of him that still doesn’t want you to see it.

But there’s a part of him that still hasn’t let go of your hand, and that steps a little closer, leans into your shoulder and doesn’t protest when you drape an arm around him. He presses himself into your side slowly, like any inch closer to you could be the one where you arbitrarily reject him, until finally his head’s against your collarbone and you can feel every terse breath that slides out of him.

You stand like that for too long, until light starts creeping up the horizon and the dull throb behind your eyes can’t even be held at bay by the natural wonder that is Adam Parrish, and you need to go somewhere and do something and probably see to your hands before they get infected. Adam collapses into the passenger seat and your soft, hazy relief at the sight is barely tempered by exhaustion.

It has been a very long night.

**Author's Note:**

> As always, I'd love to know what you thought! My tumblr is [here](http://kiiouex.tumblr.com/).


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